The three sentence rule
September 8th, 2008When I was living in Tokyo, I created a conversational rule for myself: if someone asked a question and I couldn’t answer it in three sentences or less, I would say, “I don’t know.”
After three sentences, people’s eyes glaze over — they weren’t really that interested in the first place, they are in conversational mode, so not ready to absorb a lot of detail, etc. And “I don’t know” is a particularly good answer, since it can’t be misinterpreted the way, for example, “It would take too long to explain” is usually interpreted as a request to be cajoled.
The end result wasn’t that I ended up saying “I don’t know” a lot, though, it was that I got better at explaining things in three sentences. Three sentences convey the right amount of detail to have a chance of making it into long-term memory, and they take the right amount of “conversational time”: people often ask a question not because they want information, but because they want to introduce a topic, share some free-association the topic inspired, talk about their own experience related to the topic, or warm up to the “real” question they wanted to ask. Making a short answer yields the floor back over to them so they can embroider on the topic they’ve introduced.
The three-sentence rule was extremely effective: conversations with newcomers to Japan on the idiosyncrasies of Japanese food, culture, dating and the rest were suddenly much less like school and much more lively, and the success of the rule gave me some insight into PowerPoint culture: PowerPoint presentations are not meant to provide detail on a subject. They are meant to give your audience the three bullet points they need to explain a topic conversationally and yield the floor back to their interlocutor without having to say, “I don’t know.”